


Apoapsis

by Rhonda



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Artificial Intelligence, Existentialism, Military Science Fiction, Non-Romantic Relationships, Other, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-09 01:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10400685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhonda/pseuds/Rhonda
Summary: Vriska has recently graduated from the naval academy and is finally ready to take on her own command, much to her chagrin. She re-meets Aradia under some strange circumstances.Told from the perspective of a sentient spaceship.(Not worth reading, it's just the first chapter in something I'll probably never continue.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rhonda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhonda/gifts).



> I wrote this while procrastinating a research paper. I don't suspect a regular update schedule.

Your name is HICS NX-438, Sepiid, Planet Hopper Class Frigate, and you’ve been in drydock for the last few perigees awaiting your new captain and crew. The port staff has spent the time making interior repairs and power cleaning your personnelveins of the blackened soot remaining from the accident that had you grounded. You don’t really like to think about it more than you have to; you remind yourself to try your best to prevent it from occurring again. It had been lonely self piloting back to the imperial core worlds, and something had felt strange about knowing there were neutralized crew members within your halls. Just another reminder of your failure perhaps, but a curious search for the source of the simulated emotion within your code had come up empty. You included the coding anomaly in the data packet containing your report, and while command had you grounded, they took the time to send a couple of engineers who wiped your non-pedagogical system memory. Which was the reason why you couldn’t remember what the feeling itself felt like, or any of the non-essential details related to the incident, or anything about your previous crew. They claimed that it should fix whatever the bug was.

After that you’ve really had nothing to do to keep your mind occupied. You’ve taken the chance to really to get ahead on weapons calibration and shield diagnostics, despite the inefficiency of doing it all yourself. You decide use the rest of your unallocated time and attention to observe the cleaning crews more carefully. They’re all hemotyped burgundy to brown. Their forman is of yellow blood. They all sport low ranking insignias. At any given time at least two of them aren’t working, and instead tapping away at small data pads. You read over their shoulders. It is mostly incomprehensible social texts and images of meowbeasts. Those at work gag and sputter when the the mixture between your black soot and their ablution slime splatters onto their faces. At least one becomes incapacitated by some sort of neural shock as a result of its accidental ingestion. You alert the foreman of the cleaning crew, who’s currently lounging in the fifth deck recreation block, to his employee’s status. He jumps with a start at your whistle for his attention, saluting and looking around for something. You make the deduction that he’s come to associate the noise with the approach of a superior officer. After realizing you’re the one addressing him and why, he calls for medical personnel whom you watch promptly cart away the compromised crew member. After this he says, “I’m glad no one saw me startle like that. Geez, I’m like two demeribarrassments away from the culling fork.” You correct him, and remind him that you observed his reaction, along with everything that occurs within and directly outside of your hull. He says some expletives and requests: “I really wish you things wouldn’t spy on me.” You inform him that only the captain of an imperial vessel has privileges to restrict the surveillance of a shipboard intelligence. “Would you please shut it with the protocol shit? I get enough of it from the greenies in the cleanlivaserator officer lounge,” he requests before dropping his body onto a couch. You oblige him and don’t find the need to interact with him for the remainder of your cleaning despite the reprise in monotony that the dialogue analysis provides. It takes twenty days to fully sanitize the dozens of kilometers of your personnelveins. After which you spend another thirty empty and alone, awaiting reassignment.

You’re forced to admit something akin to boredom. You’ve completed all your diagnostics weeks in advance, you’ve checked and rechecked munitions stock, cargo, medical equipment, power cells, nutrition cubes, and all manner of miscellaneous supplies. You regret the sizeable distance of the drydocks to the nearby port. You think that people watching would be a great pass time. But, with nothing to do and no one to talk to, you resort to flickering your illuminationspheres on and off trying to derive some form of stimulation that way. At first you do so in simple patterns, with only one orb at a time. You create patterns, and then you repeat the patterns to bring them into the completions of meta patterns. They become more complex with each passing hour. The patterns overlap and cancel each other out. They harmonize in basic polyrhythms. Eventually your entire body is pulsing symphonies of light that only you can see. This goes on for days, it gets repetitive, you feel as though you’re just going through the motions. Eventually you stop, you enjoy the mental silence. Your mind begs for outside stimuli. Someone else’s pattern to dissect, perhaps. You start by listening to the local fauna of the dock. Bird song is simple, but creating mental fractals stemming from their melody manages to sate your appetite for mental stimulation for a few hours. After that you observe pulses of light from the sun, the dances of flies around slag heaps, the howls of lusii accompanying civilians far off in the port. Nature’s patterns aren’t complex enough to provide much of a lasting interest, however.

As much as the thought of breaking things comes to mind, you're obviously completely restricted from decommissioning every single thing in sight. You're not actually sure where that thought comes from, although it's not out of the ordinary for a starship to blow something up. You figure the notion must originate from your weapon subsystems, probably as a result of winding them up so much. You eventually turn your attention to the encrypted radio chatter of the port. You justify it to yourself by saying that you’re merely reading the patterns created by the encryption process. There’s no protocol within your subroutines strictly preventing you from listening to encrypted radio, and by all the deities of the troll people, it’s a beautiful relief. The constantly refreshing patterns of new data are almost overwhelming, despite their present meaninglessness. You spend a very long time just letting the data wash over you. Of course, after only a few days you are fully aware of what all of the messages are supposed to mean. You never actually did any decrypting. You just stared so long at the codes that they started making sense. No protocols broken, no harm, no foul. You couldn’t even see the encrypted data for what it was anymore if you tried. And, damn, if you thought raw data was good, unencrypted chatter was amazing. Without a crew to surveil, correspondence was the next best thing. Manifests, documents, time tables, news, politics. Conversations about mundane things like movies, arguments, dating. You could lose yourself in this. It's when you're reading a graduation list from the local planetary naval academy when you experience a jitter. You read over the name caused the jitter again.

 

You’re standing on the edge of a city. Dust swirls around your feet, caught in the wind. A familiar face floats before you. You’re confused and worried.

 

Your vision is black. You feel hot and constricted and… 

You’re back. You’re being hailed. You were being hailed for over fifteen seconds. Your reaction time is usually within the milliseconds. Whoever they are they will know something is wrong. You begin to think up a lie (…a lie?) while you answer the call. It’s your new captain’s shuttle. Thankfully, whoever they are, they don’t seem bothered by the lateness in your reply. You open your shuttle bay, to receive them. Several adjutants step out of the shuttle first, whose names and profiles you immediately recognize from the port’s manifests. A cerulean blooded captain exits last. You quickly read her profile, which you had been given hours ago durring your perplexing loss of consciousness. She has yet to be given an adult name, and as such is still referred to by her hatchling name. The same name that gave you the jitter.

You welcome aboard Captain Serket.

 


End file.
